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Re: Can I trust downloading Python?

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  Re: Can I trust downloading Python? Dave Angel <davea@davea.name> - 2013-09-08 03:37 +0000
    Re: Can I trust downloading Python? Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2013-09-10 02:28 +0100

#53840 — Re: Can I trust downloading Python?

On 7/9/2013 21:17, Aaron Martin wrote:

> Hi, I am thinking about getting a software but it requires python, so that
> brought up a few questions. Is it safe do download python, and does it come
> with spam or advertisements? If it doesn't then should I get the latest
> version? I mostly want to know if it is safe to download, because most of
> the time downloading free stuff off the internet comes with spam and all
> that, so I want to know if I can trust downloading it.
>

Python is available without ads, trojans, viruses, or other malware. 
However, the internet is a big place, and there are undoubtedly some
places which will add their own garbage to the download.

If you get Python from python.org, or from activestate.com, it'll be
safe.  Someone here will be glad to give you a link, once you identify
just what you actually need:

1) what OS are you running?  Actually, we can be pretty sure you're
running Windows, since any other common operating system would have
already included Python.  But you will need to know whether it's 32bit
or 64 bit OS.  You can run a 32bit Python on 64bit OS, but not the oter
way around.  And most people just match the bitness of Python against
the bitness of the OS.

2) What version of Python does that software you're talking about
require?  The two most lkely candidates are 2.7 or 3.3  There are
packages out there that haven't yet ported to 3.x, so you may be stuck
with 2.7.  But if the package is older, you might even need 2.6


-- 
DaveA

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#53896

On Sun, 08 Sep 2013 03:37:15 +0000, Dave Angel wrote:

> You can run a 32bit Python on 64bit OS, but not the oter way
> around.  And most people just match the bitness of Python against the
> bitness of the OS.

AFAICT, most people run 32-bit Python on any version of Windows.

[And this isn't limited to Python; most of the software on my Win64
system is 32-bit. And most of the 64-bit software is accounted for by
software which has to be 64-bit due to containing device drivers, shell
extensions or similar.]

Any add-on package which provides pre-compiled binaries will provide
32-bit binaries. Some of them will also provide 64-bit binaries, some of
them won't.

So unless you think that you might need to use more than 3-4 GiB of RAM
for a single Python process, or you need to use certain libraries
which are only available as 64-bit, getting the 32-bit version is
typically the safest option.

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